From the Publisher:Abducted by teen genius Bounce and her drifter friends Wiggins and Orange, three-year-old Frog seems content to eat cereal and play a video game about wolves all day--a game that parallels the reality around her--until Wiggins is overcome by guilt and tension and takes action.

Annotation:Adam Rapp's dark, acutely distressing story of three teens kidnapping a little girl makes for emotionally searing young adult fiction. Whip-smart 14-year-old Bounce manipulates Wiggins and Orange, two drugged out seventh grade boys, into helping her hold a four-year-old girl in a basement. Called the Frog, the girl sits with a videogame all day while money dribbles in from false missing posters the teens have put up. Bounce is planning on using the funds to do something even worse, but Wiggins is getting more and more nervous about her motives. With sharp writing and a gut-wrenching plot, the troubled lives of these teenagers and the consequences of their actions will haunt readers.

Author Bio

Adam Rapp

Adam Rapp isn't known for his warm and gentle YA novels. In fact, he writes some of the most stark and realistic novels for his young audiences. Adam never thought about becoming a writer when he was younger, and never really knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. That all changed when he happened to wind up in poetry class his sophomore year of college. When the poetry class finished, he signed up for a fiction course and changed his major to writing. After graduating from college and landing a job at a publishing house, he wrote his first draft of MISSING THE PIANO, which would be his first published novel. An editor at Penguin wanted to meet with him and read it. Adam was nervous and excited--he didn't even have an agent, and here was a publisher who might be interested in his book! After it was published, it received the 1995 Best Book for Young Adults Award, as well as the 1995 Best Book for Reluctant Readers Award. Adam says that though his books haven't been banned from schools or libraries, they have been "kept off the shelves" by a few. His books, such as THE COPPER ELEPHANT and THE BUFFALO TREE, could be called "crossover novels"--they fall into both the young adult and adult fiction categories. When Adam's writing, he tries not to think about who the audience might be. He just writes. Adam also enjoys writing plays and has received the Princess Grace Fellowship for Playwrighting, as well as the prestigious honor to attend Julliard as a Playwright-in-Residence. He loves to write fiction and plays, but feels that he is a better novelist. Adam gets some of his best ideas when he's just walking around New York City, playing basketball, or just lying in bed, but his words of advice for young readers go far beyond that. He encourages young writers to read and write as much as they can. He once wrote 600 (terrible, as he says) short stories during a summer, and that was the best practice he ever had. Adam starts his days by playing basketball and then writing for about four or five hours. After he's finished writing, he edits--he usually edits right up until the book is going to be published! A fun fact: THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by JD Salinger and IN THE SKIN OF A LION by Michael Ondaatje are two books that Adam loves so much, he wish he would have written them first!